As someone who casually enjoys 40K, it has a tendency to attract some of the most rancid people. OSR has this problem too sometimes, but its not nearly as bad as 40k. And the general RC hobby. Part of the reason i don’t fly fpv drones as much as I’d like too, can’t stand the chuds at the airfield I’ve never met a more unhappy group of people, and they don’t even fly anything there either!
Weightlifters seem to hove about similar parts make up very kind people who just want others to succeed and people who listen to Joe rogan and Jordan Peterson.
Lmao this is so true. One or the other, no in between.
I used to enjoy conspiracy theories, because I thought it would be cool if they were true.
Things like cryptids, aliens, etc…
But now all the conspiracy groups are filled with stupid right-wing science deniers.Same. I have always loved it as a fictional genre, and as a fun sort of “what if” form of escapism for life in general. We’ve pretty much taken all the mystery out of the world, so that kind of stuff filled that void for me for a long time. But then it turned into a pipeline to recruit people into right-wing paranoia, and now I can’t really enjoy it anymore.
this is definitely a vibe. no more cooky dale gribble types anymore, only weird race supremacist and shit nowadays.
but i will say that this,
We’ve pretty much taken all the mystery out of the world
is patently untrue. if you’re the kind of person to say there’s no more mystery to the world it’s more likely than not that you would’ve said the same thing hundreds of years ago too.
modern people get very preoccupied with the idea of the sum of all human knowledge. the reality is a lot more patchwork than it seems.
for example, most people would fail a basic physics exam. yet this knowledge is fundamental to the vast majority of discoveries made over the past centuries.
not even to mention how we overestimate the knowledge infrastructure we have in the modern period. information is not nearly as free or accessible as most would like to believe, but this is a separate can of worms.
just because “we” know something doesn’t mean we know something. there is still an absolute abundance of mystery in this world; it is a narrative lie fed to you that “everything has basically already been discovered.”
even in contexts that it seems obvious that the topic has been so well trodden as to be “solved”, like global exploration; it’s a myth “there’s nothing left to discover,” in any context. we haven’t even begun to map the vast majority of this planet. what’s under the seas, under the crust? we don’t know for sure.
exploration, math, physics, engineering, computation, the humanities, etc. don’t let anyone convince you that you were “born too late” to do these things. you live in the most golden age to learn, in fact. it isn’t a tragedy, common knowledge, it’s the most beautiful success of the human race. never before has the average person been so well-endowed to explore and discover.
all it takes is having an engineer’s mindset, to be curious. unfortunately being curious is a lot like being a good person. it sounds great and most people claim it as a personal trait, but the reality is that being curious or being a good person are skills that take actual work and effort to hone. just claiming to be curious or a good person doesn’t cut it, reality demands her actors be method.
I wasn’t being literal about there being nothing left unknown in the whole universe. Just that we’ve (at least in the west) culturally outgrown stuff like ghost stories and other supernatural folklore, and that the X-Files type of conspiracy theory entertainment took its place, and it’s hard to enjoy now because that space has been taken over by a bunch of paranoid lunatics.
My initial reaction was what the other person said, but as I was reading theirs I kinda shifted view.
Taking the mystery out of the world doesn’t mean we’ve answered all the questions, it just means our expectation has shifted and we assume that all the dark corners have been explored.
Villages in the most remote parts of the world have Disney T-shirts.
There’s no troll under the bridge.
Our stories of the unknown increasingly feature people as the monster.It’s not bad, and there’s still wonder in learning about the world around us, it’s just a different perspective where the default is a lot more skeptical and assumes there’s an answer, even if it’s not currently known.
Even conspiracy theories have shifted tone to being more disbelief in rational things than belief in irrational things.
Blacksmithing/bladesmithing.
I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom’s backyard.
Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I’d never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.
The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn’t white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)
I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don’t bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don’t want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.
Surely there are communities of bladesmiths that aren’t total bastards, right?
They mainly make longswords
Try being a Warhammer 40k enjoyer. Some people forget that humanity are STILL BAD GUYS in 40k.
Hydroponics as well I guess. My DIY automated grow room with a water pump, grow lights, heater and plant shaker (for pollination) always has people think I’m growing weed but I just want chillies and tomatoes.
Try being a classicist… it’s rough out here. Can’t really say I love Greece and Rome without sounding insane.
Interesting. Literally all my friends like Rome and especially Greece. They’re big into e.g. percy jackson (or at least were when they read YA novels), hades, and so on.
Difference between being a fan of mythology and a fan of the history
Warhammer 40k. I like to paint little green guys and then move them around a battlefield.
A good half of the poeple in this hobby are almost entirely irredeemable
You’re the third top level comment to say 40k but no one has explained what type of people are attracted to this hobby?
Neo-nazis for whom the satire of the setting is completely lost. Also a fair mix of incels, racists, and all around bigots
Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it… There’s this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I’m so, so glad when someone I’m talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don’t need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don’t suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I’ve seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let’s not speak of online mentions. Imagine how many respect him, yet have no idea how screwed up he is.)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
It’s such a shame. I feel like programmers were way more left only a decade or so ago.
I wonder how true that is. Maybe they were considered left in their time, but something we see differently today, then. I really should hit the books on this one.
It’s a bit of a tangent(!), but Parrish gave a talk I think is relevant here. In Programming is Forgetting (transcript, watching optional), she analyzes a book about hackers from the eighties and dissects the ethics of hacker culture—a very loose definition, mind you.
This is all beside the point, because while interesting throughout what I’d really like to point to is the section on the rewiring of the PDP-1. Agree or disagree with any other, that part made me rethink how I saw older generations of programmers. I consider the dignity of all people an important tenet of my leftist values today, and women then were second-class, even in computing. Even when excelling.
So I feel like things have actually improved overall, but it’s difficult to say how much. That really is a shame, it ought to be a lot clearer.
Not as bad, but people interested in Ancient Greece / Rome / classical studies tend to be somewhat conservative. It’s (to some extent) the only part of academia which is overtly conservative.
But yeah, you can do a lot worse, that’s relatively mild
The Roman empire is the first reich according to Nazis
So it is also the first red flag
Really? With all the gay sex?
Old school games enjoyer: “Games used to be awesome… modern games are garbage”
🚨
Morrowind is better than Skyrim
😎
I particularly enjoy the telvanni lore
🚨
Great you’re going to make me install Morrowind again
Whyd you ever uninstall it?
I enjoy Powerlifting, Fishing, and Carpentry. I don’t have any friends from those hobbies.
I’ve only interacted with woodworkers online where people are generally helpful and supportive. Are they really nutjobs in real life?
Oh ya… Gym goers are notoriously right wing… It is annoying.
Even in Europe (where I am from), most gym goers are people who would have voted for Trump. I think it might be due to the fact they are generally younger? I don’t know. I do know that it is annoying trying to befriend someone and then you find out they are right wing. God damn.
Might be for the fact that gym heads spend way too much time in the gym listening to Joe Rogan or some other moron’s podcast.
Cryptography.
Is it surprising to you that people can spend their free time independent of their political paradigm?
No, it’s bothersome how certain hobbies are more likely to attract bad people
I understand the distaste toward conservatism with current events. If you think that conservative = bad, then you have a very narrow frame of mind.
The people behind the current events aren’t conservative. They don’t try to conserve. They try to destroy, uproot, and drag us back. They are reactionaries, everything-was-better-in-the-50s daydreamers, and neoliberal oligarchs. They do not care about conserving moral values, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted a criminal into office. Conservative is a word they are hiding behind, like a marketing slogan. Like how fascists figured out that calling themselves patriots makes them acceptable.
I do not think that conservative = bad. In fact, I myself believe that with many issues, it might be better to wait for the dust to settle a bit, and to not jump on every hype train. I would even go as far as saying I am a patriot, if that word wasn’t dragged through the mud by mouth-breathing, racist neo-fascists.
Those people do not deserve to be called conservative. Call them reactionaries or oligarchs. Because that is what they are.
Amateur Radio.
The first video I found on Baofeng Radio guides is on a youtube channel run by some right winger that sounds like a SovCit, who makes “jokes” about people who wear mask and have this “gay humor”.
Like bruh
(I mean, I guess it makes sense. Right-wing “anarchists” are skeptical of “government control” and are the type of people to want to use radios instead of smartphones. Buts its ironic that encryption is illegal… But I assume they probably just ignore the “no encryption” rule anyways since they are a SovCit.)
